Prologue- Before the Fracture

Before the crown.

Before the silence.

Before the end of all things...

There was only hunger.

And a boy walking through the ruins of forgotten gods.

The Wastes of Eryndor stretched endlessly around him, a graveyard of broken empires and sunless skies. Ash fell like snow. The wind whispered in dead tongues. What light remained came from the distant fires of dying stars, too weak to touch the earth.

And Kael walked alone.

He was no king.

No conqueror.

Not yet.

Just another forsaken scrap of flesh and bone, drifting between the carcasses of forgotten kingdoms.

But even there, where the world had long since stopped caring, signs of the future were waiting.

Waiting for him.

He passed beneath the shattered arch of a once-great temple.

Etched into the crumbling stone were symbols, worn and half-buried in dust.

A spiral of fractured glass—a mark later known as the crest of Lysara the Shardmother.

Nearby, a rusted bell lay on its side, cracked in two.

If Kael had struck it, perhaps it would've sung the first note of the Endless Melody, long before the Howler King would ever exist.

Further on, a weathered mural, barely visible under centuries of grime, showed figures sewing the air itself together with silver thread.

One of them looked disturbingly familiar.

As though Syllen Voidstitch had been watching this road long before Kael ever walked it.

And in the distance, a shadow on the horizon shifted in the ash—a figure that vanished the moment Kael turned his head.

A silhouette wearing a smile too wide, flickering like a dream half-remembered.

Some would later say that was the first appearance of Kaelenis the Forgotten Dream, keeping silent watch over the boy who would someday awaken gods and break worlds.

But Kael saw none of these things.

He only felt the hunger.

And the cold.

And the weight of a sky that pressed down like an unspoken promise.

Then the voice came.

Soft.

Patient.

Like the final whisper of a dying world.

"You are not meant to die here."

"You are meant to become the end."

Kael froze.

Looked around.

There was nothing.

Only the bones. Only the sky. Only the ruins of a thousand forgotten futures.

"One day," the voice said, "you will decide whether everything deserves to end... or begin again."

Kael coughed out a laugh. A broken, bitter thing.

> "You've got the wrong person," he muttered into the wind.

"I'm just a corpse that hasn't figured out how to fall over yet."

But deep inside, a spark took root.

A flicker of something dangerous.

Something eternal.

For the first time, Kael imagined a life beyond the next stolen meal.

Beyond the next night beneath the rubble.

Beyond survival.

A life where the world answered to him.

Where no one was ever Forsaken again.

And as the ash drifted, Kael took another step.

One step closer to tomorrow.

One step closer to eternity.

One step closer to the moment when the crown would fracture, and the legends would rise from the wreckage.

The boy who was nothing...

was already becoming everything.

He just didn't know it yet.